chapter 19
She’d been trying to get me to leave the house because the board had hired a private investigator to photograph anyone who came and went late at night and she didn’t want me and Tyler in those photos, not because she was trying to move in, but because she’d seen the email thread where a board member used the words “leverage custody” like they were talking about staplers.
I read the email twice. Then I called her, because some things should have human voices attached. She answered on the second ring. “If you need to yell, I can absorb it,” she said. I didn’t yell. I asked her why she hadn’t said anything earlier. She said, “Because every time I tried to tell you something, Matthew asked me to let him do it himself, and then he didn’t.” She sighed. “And because I wanted you to make your choices without me being the convenient villain in a story that belongs to you.”
I thanked her. She laughed in that exhausted way women laugh when they’ve been running a marathon holding everyone else’s water. “Don’t thank me,” she said. “Make him earn the word ‘Dad’ with a thousand boring, consistent Tuesdays.”
Update 8: The court day where nothing exploded
Finalizing the divorce felt anticlimactic. There was no cross-examination worthy of a TV pilot, no last-minute reveal. The judge read the agreement, asked if we understood the terms, asked if they were entered into freely, and then hit the gavel like a person clicking “Agree” on a software license. I got primary physical custody, shared legal custody with a tie-breaker provision for medical decisions, child support calculated by a formula with more footnotes than a grad thesis, and the house—sold, proceeds split per a formula that favored the primary parent. There was a paragraph about holidays that made my head hurt and a paragraph about passports that made my lawyer hum contentedly.
We walked out into sun that felt almost fake, too bright for the fluorescent-lit gravity of the proceeding, and Tyler, who had been with my mother, ran to me like a heat-seeking missile.